Did the Broadcom Acquisition of VMware Leave You Feeling High-and-Dry?

For NSX customers and partners who are Star Trek fans, VMware getting absorbed into the huge Broadcom product line might remind them of the Borg collective: “Resistance is Futile!”

I lived through similar events when I was at IronPort, and we got purchased by Cisco. We were able to keep interest in the email security part of our product, but for the most part, our products were abandoned in the strategy of the huge new parent company.

People I’ve spoken to at trade shows and in the field have shared concerns about the new pricing strategy, and some have expressed their doubts about support for NSX going forward.  I sure don’t have any insight into those high-level strategic issues, but I do know this: some customers just want the best, most secure, and cost-effective solution for zero trust microsegmentation. They see that stopping the lateral movement of malware in their enterprise environments is crucial. They want to solve that problem. They know that if they don’t, the first time a hacker finds an initial compromise of their perimeter defenses, the attack will spread until the hacker degrades their digital operations or encrypts their data for ransom. And that initial penetration seems to be inevitable these days, if you keep up with the news about recent high-profile breaches. Think about the attack on the big retailer, Target, eighteen months ago. The hackers got into the HVAC system and wandered around like they were James Bond strolling the enemy’s casino, opening doors, lifting card keys, and quickly recovering the stolen nuclear device.

We’ve moved past the era where firewalls at the perimeter are enough. Internal attacks have wholly evaded standard firewalls and traditional VLAN network segmentation. The challenge is that many CISOs’ budgets tend to be heavy on breach prevention and money for firewalls, authentication systems and endpoint security.  Unfortunately, these systems can’t address the lateral movement that happens once a hacker is in the network. They need to go beyond breach prevention and become breach ready.

But the challenge for NSX users since the acquisition is that they don’t necessarily want disaster recovery, network automation, and microsegmentation all in one tool. This comes from how the NSX product was first developed – as a tool to enhance VMware’s virtual infrastructure. But with the new pricing scheme since the acquisition, the best we can tell is that NSX is no longer a stand-alone purchase.  I read multiple Reddit threads attempting to explain which subscriptions and options need to be purchased to obtain it.  And since Broadcom terminated the VMware channel partners ecosystem, customers can’t call their trusted VAR for help.

As a next generation offering that didn’t start out as a side project, ColorTokens has been architected to maximize security while being a very light burden on protected systems and networks. We lead the pack in being able to secure the widest range of systems so that it doesn’t matter if they are on-prem, in the cloud, or in a container, and we can even manage legacy, IoT and OT devices that aren’t able to run an agent. Our interface provides visibility into the traffic of complex, interdependent systems which often beguile administrators. That insight, along with the suggested templates and flexible implementation, allowed us to lock down a recalcitrant installation of a big, complicated enterprise application like Epic in 30 days. Forrester rates our Xshield Enterprise Microsegmentation Platform^TM as a Leader in microsegmentation in their latest Wave report, and we score very highly in the user reviews on the Gartner Peer Insights website.

I feel for those who have relied on NSX for years and who are now confronting the requirement to purchase an annual subscription for a bundle of products they don’t want. But you don’t have to be assimilated by the Borg. You can explore the world outside NSX and Broadcom. Resistance is not futile. Cyber Resilience is where we will boldly go together! Contact us and we will start the journey together.